How To Create A Sustainable Social Media Strategy

Guest Post - Our host is Marcela De Vivo, In this post Marcela has some fresh social media tips and ideas for you.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

After Google's Penguin update, establishing and maintaining an active social media strategy is more important than ever. Since Google uses social media markers as part of their ranking algorithm, being active in social media will not only gain you new followers and visitors, it will also increase your search engine rankings.

The question, however, is how do you create a sustainable social media strategy where by you are adding content to all of your social media channels, while also running a blog, business, taking care of your customers, etc?

Why Use Social Media?

When you use social media to promote your brand and website, you can do so for free or for very little cost in comparison to paying for an advertisement or listing in a newspaper, magazine, or even on a billboard. When you use social media, you are also able to update and share new releases at any time with you fans and the followers of your brand or website.

Understanding Your Brand and Audience

Before you begin implementing a social media strategy for your website and company, you should first take time to understand your target audience and its age range and demographic to help you with reaching them as efficiently as possible. This will also help you to stay relevant.

Updating Consistently While Staying Relevant

Updating all of the social media sites and pages you have created to represent your website and brand is recommended daily to keep the consistent updates happening, allowing you to easily reach an audience regardless of the time of day. Also, staying relevant is important so researching your industry frequently for new discoveries, advances, and even trends can help you to draw in more page views from links clicked on and shared using social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

How to Draw in New Visitors to Your Website and Brand

You can draw in and attract new visitors to your site and brand's pages online by featuring eye-catching titles and information along with sales, and even giveaways or contests, depending on the type of budget you have and the services or products you have to offer. Ask your followers and fans to help by sharing the links you post with their own family and friends to get more genuinely interested click-through links when the links have been shared with someone personally, helping to grow your site.

A Sustainable Example Schedule

Most small business owners only have 1-2 hours a day to dedicate to social media marketing. Below are a few ideas for how to organize your schedule:

Day 1: Spend time on Google News and other News sites researching what's happening in the world related to your industry. As you are reading and researching, write down notes and ideas, and bookmark relevant articles. By the end of this time period you should have a nice database of topics.

Day 2: Write as many tweets, FB wall posts, and Google + posts as you can, with links to their relevant sources. Then use a tool such as TweetDeck to schedule them so they will be "dripped" into your social channels slowly over the coming days.

Day 3: Write 4-5 articles for your blog. Post and schedule them on your blog so they will be posted one at a time over the following few days.

Day 4: Write 4-5 articles for other industry sites or blogs. Send them out to sites that accept guest blogs so you can increase your links to your site.

Day 5: Write 4-5 articles and distribute to web 2.0 sites such as Wikia and Ehow. Make sure you link your articles with other articles on other profiles written by you.

The following week, you can follow the same strategy, but sending/distributing the content to other sources so you are not sending content to the same sites over and over again.

By the end of the month you would've successfully created new content for your own blog, social media channels, as well as increased your authority and popularity by getting published on other blogs and web 2.0 sites.

By Guest Author -Marcela De Vivo has been in the Internet marketing industry for 12 years.She blogs about life and SEO at MarcelaDeVivo.com